Long after the Fall, the last forest elves on the Great Continent are forced to abandon their secluded home and forge an unprecedented alliance in hopes of retaliating against the great evil that has befallen Irdya. But even then, they will require more than one ancient power to aid them in their quest...

(Intermediate level, 24 scenarios.)

Although not strictly required, players are advised to become familiar with the stories, characters, and historical events presented in Under the Burning Suns and (optionally) Descent into Darkness before playing this campaign.

The latest release of this campaign is intended to work with Wesnoth 1.12.0 and later only. Development versions from the 1.13.x series are not supported at this time.

Feedback

There are two officially-sanctioned venues for posting your feedback on this campaign: the feedback topic in the Add-on Feedback section, or this same topic you are reading right now. The Add-on Feedback topic has a questionnaire template and an optional survey, whereas this development topic encourages free-form posting and it is generally more fitting for bug reports and minor comments or general questions and exchanges with other posters. It is up to you to decide which communication channel to use and how!

The nomenclature for scenarios and episodes of this campaign (which I use in my own posts) is Sx (scenario x). This may be used as a convenient shorthand in lieu of the complete scenario name. Most scenarios throughout the campaign include this shorthand along with the standard scenario name during story screen sections.

Translating

Translating this campaign is by no means an easy task. A few things to keep in mind:

The 1.12 and 1.13/1.14 versions of the campaign are identical, using conditional code to keep compatibility for both versions. You should translate only one version of the campaign and then ask the WesCamp admin(s) to copy the strings over to the other version.

Especially later on, there are many non-visual cues indicating the mood of a scene or a line as spoken by a character. While reading the WML or playing the campaign helps, there are also many gettext comments scattered through to help with this. If you are using poedit or similar, you should be able to see the comments or annotations attached to a particular line (msgid), as well as the source file path(s) and line number(s).

Many lines are deliberately vaguely worded in the English original. You may find relevant comments or annotations, or you may ask in this forum topic for help.

Only complete translations will be included with the campaign. You should notify me in this topic once your translation is listed as such in http://gettext.wesnoth.org/.

So, after so many years of work, it’s finally here: the first public Reconstruction release; that is, not counting this year’s April 1st release (which apparently everyone simply assumed to be a hoax instead of actually downloading it from the trunk add-ons server).

Because I can no longer afford writing code or words due to spending the whole budget on this single initial release, I’m going to cut this post short and talk about the Reconstruction development process at a later time, assuming anyone actually wants to know about it. (Let’s do an experiment: if you are reading this, post below. Come on, you know you want to say something.)

A couple of caveats for legacy IftU players:

Do NOT use your old saved games with this and future versions! Start over from the beginning. Seriously. You will break the campaign if you do otherwise.

Music is no longer included in the main campaign download, which is why its size went down from 15 MiB to 9.73 MiB. The first time you install or upgrade to IftU 2.0 RC 1 or later, you will see a dependency resolution prompt suggesting installing the IftU Music add-on. Installing the music add-on is not required. This separation of packages is provided as a convenience for people who don’t play with music or sounds enabled, or people on metered connections (e.g. mobile broadband).

Special thanks to nemaara and vultraz for making this release possible.

First of all, congratilations on the update, it surely was a massive task to undertake because of the size of the campaign.
I will eventually download and play it when i have more time, for now i just have one question. Is there a transition from one episode to another like before, or is it just 24 scenarios long without it? I ask this because, in the previous versions, there was the feeling that the second episode was easier than the first one, maybe because there was a need to also balance it for players who started right from that point.

ahmannar wrote:First of all, congratilations on the update, it surely was a massive task to undertake because of the size of the campaign.

Thanks!

ahmannar wrote:Is there a transition from one episode to another like before, or is it just 24 scenarios long without it? I ask this because, in the previous versions, there was the feeling that the second episode was easier than the first one, maybe because there was a need to also balance it for players who started right from that point.

The episodes still exist (episode I has 13 scenarios, episode II has only 11 scenarios) and you have the option to continue on to E2 straight from E1, or start E2 without gold and recalls, just like before.

Although no-one has tested playing E2 alone in this version yet, there are some new measures in place to make sure that the difficulty level is more or less the same for both episodes. In particular, you will be forced to part ways with some of your recalls at two points; one near the end of E1, and another near the middle of E2. I found that this approach worked well in AtS, so that’s one of the first things I set on adding to IftU. Some redundant (Aragwaithi) or obsoleted recruits (Ghoul, Elvish Spirits) are also no longer available.

In general, whether IftU is easier or harder than before will probably vary between different players and play-styles, and it definitely will need tweaks depending on other people’s experience with the new version. At least the campaign isn’t falsely advertised as being for “advanced” players anymore; it’s now officially for “intermediate” players, like AtS.

shadowm wrote:Because I can no longer afford writing code or words due to spending the whole budget on this single initial release, I’m going to cut this post short and talk about the Reconstruction development process at a later time, assuming anyone actually wants to know about it. (Let’s do an experiment: if you are reading this, post below. Come on, you know you want to say something.)

As you wish. . . I´d be very interested in reading about this at a later time.

I´d also still be interested in translating this campaign to German at a later point if noone has actually done so, but before that I´d have to finish my suggestionwork for EA and with the few hours/month I have to spare for Wesnoth at the moment that might be a long time off.

I´m looking forward to playing the campaign in my Christmas hollidays.

Once upon a time I was originally in the middle of playing the original Invasion of the Unknown, but decided to wait upon hearing news of this reconstructed version. When I get the chance, I'll play through the campaign and leave my feedback and other findings here.

Been kicking myself for 5 minutes straight now because I missed this release by one month -.- No idea how i could misread 1st December as 1st nevember but for now im happy that i found the release pretty much as soon as it was made ^^

EDIT:
description of Episode 2 says 10 scenarios, while you said Episode 2 has 11 scenarios

"A Real Confrontation"
dont read the following except you want to fix the bug or you want to become a professional bug-user

Spoiler:

Enemy Villages are counted towards the limit of elven Villages that have to remain standing (ofc it makes sense with the code, those villages are "elven" villages, but I dont think that this makes storywise a lot of sense xD)
also, if someone were to use this bug he or she could fall back incredible far and probably minimize the challenge, this scenario represents, a lot

EDIT 2:
"Memories from the Depths"
could you remove the chests (one with gold one with nothing) or move them somewhere else? Its not like anyone could reach them, now that sprites are disabled in until scenario 14...

EDIT 3:
What exactly did Alinde do? (What spell did she cast on Mal Keshar?) Its not explained
...tried to look it up in the code, but the only thing I found, is that Mal Keshar doesnt complain about the magic, even though he is supposed to

EDIT 4:
"Over the Sands"
I really like the idea of banishing ghosts Felt like a good person after banishing them all xD I also like very much how you integrated the ruins from your first version of this map into the new version ^^ (although i hoped a bit for the appeareance of sand trolls )
my only problem: you cant chose if you want to fight the humans or go for the plateau. When Mal Keshar ask for you choice, there is only the choice to go for the humans given
is a chioce with one option actually a chioce?

Last edited by Konrad2 on December 3rd, 2015, 7:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am a Ghost: I drain the life energy from other people to survive and am hated/feared by regular people. Non-regular people don't like me either though.

Fixed the village count bug in S2, as well as Mal Keshar’s missing line in S3. Thanks for the reports!

Konrad2 wrote:"Over the Sands"
my only problem: you cant chose if you want to fight the humans or go for the plateau. When Mal Keshar ask for you choice, there is only the choice to go for the humans given
is a chioce with one option actually a chioce?

The second choice is disabled for the moment because I didn’t get scenario 5b done in time beyond the general map layout. Hopefully it will be in the next release; failing that, it’ll surely be in 2.0.0.

Konrad2 wrote:„The Moon Valley“
black and purple behave weird, they seem to have no intention to attack me, all their units cluster around their respective leader

Both AIs have some unusual configuration settings that I’m pretty sure were intentional but not to this extent. I’ll see what can be done about it.

Konrad2 wrote:Why did you remove the yeti?

After finishing AtS, I received a strongly-worded letter from QA overseas telling me to reduce the number of tomato surprises in my campaigns, so I did that. Plus, the event never really seemed to fit with the story and was there only for the sake of a cheap laugh at the expense of unwary players.

Konrad2 wrote:"An Errand of Hope"
Is it intended that the black Loyalists have some Trolls on their side?

On a whim, I decided to replay Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm. I had no idea about the revision but I'm so glad for it. I'm not very far into it, but I really like the revisions so far. Some of the scenarios I remember having trouble with seem to play much better. Thank you for the update! These have always been among my favorite wesnoth campaigns.

Having completed already the first episode i thought to give in here some general feedback on the scenarios that were more overhauled and some specific things(playing in the hardest difficulty). In the future i´ll probably also post on the feedback topic:

-> The removal of sprites on "Memories from the depths" make for a more challenging scenario and also make the rest of the episode less of a walkover, so good move with it and also with the reason they appear later. Can´t talk about the spell part, because i completed it before the last fix;

-> The reworked "over the sands" feels much more orientated and well designed while still feeling a big scenario. I liked the story and conections with the bandits, although it seems kind of a strech to view the elves in such a "bad way", considering the lifestyle of the bandits;

-> The "Crossfire" seems to have a AI problem and it makes this scenario the easiest of the campaign. The lich troops are completely decimated by the chaos empire and the bandits and the bandits have such low mobility on the terrain that the few that survive the fight with the lich are easily picked off 1 by 1. In the end, the player can just move all troops against the chaos empire and, after that, it´s just a long walk to the other 2 enemy leaders without any kind of strategy involved;

-> I didn´t noticed the AI problem previously talked on the "Moon valley", it sure feels like each enemy troop´s only move when the player gets closer and can be easily distracted with a couple units, but i think otherwise this would be close to impossible to pass the scenario without huge casualties(given the difference in gold and the fact that at this point there isn´t such a high number of good recalls). If it´s intended to be a scenario to deplete part of the recall list instead, then it isn´t doing that;

->The new elements of storyline about the need for vengeance by galas and his doubts, as well as the increased conflict within the group because of mal keshar and some not so good advices by anlinde, make the story more interesting than before, kudos for managing to put this in;

-> The "goliath" one, at least for me, feels like the only scenario in the campaign that isn´t quite there yet. It still seems like a brutal massacre of the enemies units like before the reconstruction, without a need for much strategy. Given the story at this point, having a ever growing number of enemies in order to rush the player to complete the elvel seems impossible to do, but maybe something in that train of thougth can work?;

-> I feel like the there should be some kind of dialogue from galas/mal keshar when the player sees that the chaos empire has trolls on their forces, especially given that it´s previously talked that the other trolls wouldn´t ever talk peacefully(don´t remember the reason that was given, my memory is not my strongest point). Also, is it supposed that the cofin has nothing?;

-> The next 2 scenarios are some of the best i have played in the "underground" type with good enough mobility and a balanced need for veterans and new units(namely bats and sometimes walking corpses) to fend the enemy. If the second part of the campaign as them as these ones that it will surely be even better than before;

-> Nice development on galas in here, making it so that only here, faced with almost certain death, he makes the decision to finally allow mal keshar to use his powers as he wants, it improves the story when compared to the previous versions where mal keshar did this even before this scenario. The massacre was not high as i expected, lost only two shydes, two dread bats, 1 nighthaunt and 1 spectre, which will influence the next point;

-> Seeing as you said that there would be some kind of wipe list on the recalls and the fact that half of the campaign is underground,i predicted that it could be only undead related. Because of this i only recalled shydes on the underground(and 1 sharpshooter to get the bow) with hopes to conserve my elves. With this i managed to conserve 15 elves(most of then leveled until scenario 6), 6 undead units(max number allowed anyway), 2 bats and 2 necromancers(all of these units being higher than level 1). Im not sure if i am supposed to have so many units given your previous answer but the method of recall wipe, combined with the fact that undead units are much better in the last 6 scenarios of the campaign, makes so that a high number of elves makes it to the 2 part;

If this comes across as only negative feedback my apologies, but it´s easier to criticize than to compliment, anyway i tried to do that also. The campaign feels more entertaining to play, to read and, even if i ended the first part with many units, there´s a constant need to recruit great numbers of units. It seems that, in general, there´s a implied strategy to spam perphaps close to 50% of level 0 units in most scenarios, coupled with support units and some level 1 to be leveled, instead of creating a squad of killer units as it could be done before.